10:15. Iowa has already been called for Obama – no surprise. The real suspense now are the Senate races, and the size of the popular vote. I’ve got scotch and a dinner riding on this.

I’ve spent so much time on the Palin pick that I won’t bore the rest of you tonight except to say if she’s not on the ticket, McCain loses Georgia, North Carolina and Florida. She was a net plus, although McCain took a while to fully take advantage of her strengths.

Jason Mittell.. I am at the Grille , you have it dead wrong. Professor Dickenson said Palin failed to attract as many Hillary voters as she could have. He did however defend the Palin pick as defending the GOP base. You have to remember Bush wins in 2000 and 2004 were just as dependent on winning moderates as it was on increased turnout among the GOP base. There was no enthusiasm for McCain there prior to her pick

So far, the most consistent trend I have seen is Obama’s lead among female voters in almost all of the key states. In texas, if exit polls are to be trusted, Obama took 52% of the female vote. Palin may have helped with the base, but she did not help with women…

OK, stepping back to look at the important issues. It looks the political science forecast models (including Dickinson’s) are going to nail this one. McCain, given the headwind he was fighting, pretty much did as well as we predicted in the popular vote – he’s down about 3% right now, which is right where we had him.

A little thing from NC. Having lived there long ago, the area still coming in is the Research Triangle Park area (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill). Durham has a large AA population and the whole area is alot of youth. I’m thinking because of this North Carolina will go to Obama.

11:15 Well, as I just told the crowd here at the Grille, McCain ran about as close a race as you could expect – he’s down about 3% in a year that was entirely unfavorable to the Republican candidate which is pretty amazing. And it doesn’t look like the Democrats will win as many Senate seats as they wanted.

So he – and the Republican party – can hold their head high. This is about as good as one could have hoped if you are a Republican. .

I want to thank everyone for participating again tonight with the live blogging, and more generally for your participation in this blog throughout the campaign. I am going to stay on tonight to hear Obama’s speech, but then hope to get some sleep!

Not surprisingly, the pace of my blogging will slow a bit (I hope) in the coming weeks, but I will do a post-mortem on the campaign, and of course update you all on how well our forecast models did…

And don’t count out MO yet.. Obama could is likely to pick up over 100k from St Louis City, St Louis County, and Jackson County. He only trails by 55k. Of course I can’t count all the McCain votes that are yet to come in from the rural counties but overall precincts are 79% in with >100k margin for Obama in the three major counties left to come in.

MO is a dead heat. I see him netting about 50k in Jackson, St Louis City, and St Louis Counties. And of the remaining rural counties McCain should net about 20k. Obama is down by 30k but will make up about 30k.

MO is now 550 votes McCain with 99% reporting. There are 3 counties left and they should divide fairly evenly. I still think McCain wins it but we may wake up tomorrow with a margin of less than 2k in the state.

I think we can call MN for Franken now because going through by county I get Franken +5k and he’s already up by 1k. It’s all dependent on Hennepin County where he has a 90k lead with 92% reporting and St Louis County where he is up by 25k with 84% reporting. He needs to pick up another 6-8k between the two to hold onto his lead.

And MT is called for McCain. Would have been interesting if Obama won MT, MO, NC.

Undecideds: In terms of how the undecideds went, I think we are likely to see the popular vote come in with a 5-6% Obama margin with Obama support just over 52%. The RCP average had Obama’s support at 52.1% and he won’t be much higher than that if at all. I’m guessing undecideds broke for McCain close to 2:1. That is what you said wasn’t it? I thought the 5:1 was a joke but some people took it seriously.

And thanks for the shout out on Indiana in the Grille. I was very surprised to be seeing the data at the time. Bush won the state by 20% in 04.